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Is there hope for IPv6?

internetgovernance.org

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Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#151

Post by magila »

geofft wrote: post #111
jdblair wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mixing up NAT and ingress blocking. A stateful firewall doesn't depend on NAT, we're just used to ingress blocking as a side effect of NAT.

No, I think that argument makes perfect sense. A stateful firewall doesn't depend on NAT but you get all the downsides of NAT from a working stateful firewall in default-deny mode: you still have to talk the firewall into allowing the relevant traffic through, and without that you still have connections that work in one direction and not the other. The only thing that's different is address discovery, but you can sol…

As someone who works on P2P applications, if all I had to do was use PCP to open a pinhole in a firewall it would still be a big improvement over dealing with NAT.

For one thing lack of NAT makes it much easier to deal with multi-homed systems. For various reasons, multi-home is much more common with IPv6 than IPv4. Without NAT I can discover thing like what an address's scope is without querying the network. Having to ask a remote server to discover a global address turns what should be an atomic operation into a potentially troublesome state machine.

NAT also create annoying corner cases when there are local peers reachable via an address which also has a NATed global address. You may not be able to tell that the peer's address is not globally reachable, which is a problem if you want to advertise that peer to others.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#152

Post by Dagger2 »

geofft wrote: post #33
sverige wrote: post #6

> "Given that fundamental constraint, there are only three basic choices for network operators: ... 3. Run native IPv6 among compatible parts of their own network with some kind of tunneling or translation (i.e., converter technologies in economics) at the boundaries to make it compatible with IPv4 Among these viable alternatives, we show that dual stack will never get us across the finish line; it is not economical.…

Yeah, it's fascinating here that they've gone from "NAT is bad and we won't let you implement NAT, we need an internet on a single flat 128-bit address space" to "The internet will be IPv4 forever and you should implement IPv6 internally and run NAT, because we like it better than running IPv4 NAT which is what you've done for years and works great".

That's not what the article is saying. They're saying that you still need to provide access to legacy v4-only hosts on the internet somehow, and you either do that via v4 (i.e. dual stack) or by some transition technology of which NAT64 is just one possible option.

Nobody is suggesting to not talk native v6 to the internet too, they're just suggesting to not cut your users off from v4-only services.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#153

Post by xvilka »

IPv6 is already a success in mobile and IoT, and in countries that matter in economical sense. The rest will follow automatically because they have no choice. More worrying issues are BGP and SS7 reliance in global networks, and there are no viable alternatives on the horizon.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#154

Post by mikekchar »

gregmac wrote: post #134
phicoh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 3 problems with IPv6 - There is a lot in IPv6 that is different from IPv4. Ignoring if those changes are good or bad, it does make the transition harder. - IPv6 was promoted way before there was demand. To some extent it is good to prepare people (and vendors). But it does create the impression that IPv6 is a failure - Demand for IPv6 is highly asymmetrical. The party that is out of IPv4 addresses needs IPv…

- No transition or migration design. It seems like IPv6 was designed as if it was being built instead of building IPv4, and didn't consider how the move would happen beyond something like "everyone run dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, and once that's at 100% we'll turn off IPv4." This results in a stale-mate of sorts: As a server operator, as long as you have IPv4-only clients, you need an IPv4 address. There are no [1] IPv6-on…

This is literally my problem with upgrading to IPv6 currently. And at the cost of potentially embarrassing myself, I haven't really looked into what the potential problems are going to be (and I'm embarrassed to ask :-) ). My ISP will happily switch me from IPv4 to IPv6 but I've got absolutely no idea what the potential problems are. This has put the task into a near perpetual, "I'll look at that when I'm not so busy". I'm sure I'm not alone in this...

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#155

Post by paulddraper »

Dagger2 wrote: post #138
paulddraper wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wish IPv6 had done example this -- use 64 bits. The address space is still enormous: a couple billion for every currently living person (yes, I know allocating isn't 100% efficient, but even at 0.001% efficiency, that's still tens of thousands per capita). And, the address could fit in a common word size, and be significantly more readable. As is, IPv6's one-address-per-atom-on-Earth is unnecessary, the addr…

64 bits probably wouldn't be enough to let people avoid going into address conservation mode though. Heck, there are way too many ISPs allocating a single /64 in v6 land today , and there's far more space available in v6 today than there would be after 100+ years of your 64-bit space. Having an unnecessarily large amount of addresses is a good thing, because the alternative is to have too few addresses. You don't wan…

> Heck, there are way too many ISPs allocating a single /64 in v6 land today

First, ISPs are allocating them because they can. There are enough total /64 blocks for every living person to have a couple billion blocks.

Second, ISPs are allocating /64 blocks because they have to. Well, they don't have to, but there are 20 billion billion total /64 blocks. ISPs will run of capacity in their routing tables long before address blocks are exhausted.

> Having an unnecessarily large amount of addresses is a good thing

Agreed. Both 64-bit and 128-bit have unnecessarily large address spaces. But 32-bit is too few, though, and byte/word alignment is convenient. So 64-bit is convenient, unnecessarily large solution.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

dghughes wrote: post #46

I like IPv6 it can actually be easier to set up stuff instead of using IPv4 for example OSPF. But I find IPv6 is not as intuitive as IPv4 just looking at an address in IPv4 vs IPv6. You can create new networks for IPv4 pretty easily just by eyeball but not IPv6. At least I can't.

Really? I find it significantly easier.

In IPv4 you might get allocated 250.250.16.0/22, and then you have to calculate in your head where exactly that begins and ends, and carefully divvy it up into partitions of different sizes.

In IPv6 you get a /56 or /48 and you know that two or four digits are wildcards. No binary math is needed, and all subnets can be the same size of /64

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#157

Post by votepaunchy »

_0w8t wrote: post #139
zamadatix wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do the same thing with v6, the difference is problem space. TLS is about the client and the server upgrading while IP is about every box inbetween as well. If you look at TLS and HTTP version changes when the inbetween infrastructure is involved (even just a single corporate FW, not the whole path) you're held to legacy versions just the same as IP is held to legacy versions. Eventually some protocol is the b…

It is not only about intermediate boxes. Just consider how relatively smoothly various parts of WiFi stack was upgraded or how 2G->4G transition happens with mobiles phones. The biggest problem with IPv6 is that it a different protocol that requires special support on all levels starting from applications and down to managed switches.

> consider how relatively smoothly various parts of WiFi stack was upgraded

Has WiFi been upgraded? I believe new devices still have support back to 802.11b.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#158

Post by zamadatix »

zlynx wrote: post #124
CydeWeys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you're not joking, the nice thing about IPv4 is that it uses 32 bits, so you can store addresses in an unsigned int and use memory efficiently. Just adding one octet takes you up to 40 bits, which has alignment issues. You may as well go up to 64 bits (half of IPv6), which could be represented as 16 hex characters, e.g. 06A4.6E1B.12C9.95C8. That way you're kicking the can much farther down the road too.

I doubt anyone cares about efficiency or I wouldn't find people storing IP addresses in JSON, as text. Unnormalized too, so IPv6 is almost guaranteed to be broken.

That's like saying towing capacity isn't important in semi's because you see boxes from Amazon that only weigh 25 lbs. Sure some random app might only deal with 25 lbs worth of efficiency problems but it's not the only piece of software that has to process IPs, such as a load balancer, home router (on underpowered CPUs), and ever increasing amounts of software networking.

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#159

Post by z3t4 »

geofft wrote: post #52
Kranar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 allows for so many IP addresses that you could give yourself a new IP address every minute and never worry about running out.

You could, but does your device actually do so? Are you confident that 100% of the devices you own use privacy addresses and do not leak non-privacy addresses? The nice thing about IPv4 NAT is that you plug a single gadget in to your ISP's connection (cable modem, ONT, whatever), you connect your devices to that gadget, and it works out of the box and has all the security properties you'd expect, even if you're a per…

One problem with IPv4 is that each interface can only have one IP. With IPv6 an interface can have many! For example both a private and a public IP address!

Re: Is there hope for IPv6?

#160

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

leoc wrote: post #108
rbritton wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would posit that BluRay has been less successful for two other reasons: 1. DVD video quality is good enough for most. 2. The Combination of DRM, unskippable portions, and similar is enough of a barrier to discourage the upgrade. Personally, I will only watch a movie on disk when I don’t have time to rip it and remove that crap.

DVD quality may be worse than you remember. The difference is really very clear on modern HD screens.

In my experience, only if you're really looking for it or play them side by side.
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